He held a bloom between his fingers, bending the petals back. I was aware of how he studied me, the intellect behind those reflective blue eyes. Like most women, I knew when a man found me attractive. He would pay a certain kind of attention that wasn’t so much listening as taking in the sound of my voice, the shape of my profile, the turn of my lips. I was no great beauty. I had my red hair, my round dark eyes, my fat lips, but they were rough and cracked now, the skin peeling from winter’s harshness. I’d once had a good figure but now was all bones—and who could tell anyway under all these clothes? I was no regal Lisa Podharzhevskaya, no Akhmatova. I hadn’t the dignity, the mournful gravity. And yet, who was he looking at like that? He put his hand on my scarf and pushed it down, left his hand on my neck. I thought it would be rough, scaly, like lizard skin, but it was very smooth.

What was it I found so alluring about him? He smelled peculiar—like cold cellars, like decaying pines—yet I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be with him. How would such a man—whose gangs were the terror of Petrograd—make love? He stroked my hair just once, then turned and perched against the row of seedling tables like some giant messy hawk, his white hair long as an English poet’s.

“I have a job for you, Makarova. Think you can do something simple for me?”

What in the world did he need me for, with an army of criminals at his command? “How simple?” I asked.

“I want you to deliver a package for me,” he said. “You’ll need to be unarmed, I’m afraid. The customer is a bit pugliviy.” Skittish. He held out his hand. I stared at it. “Your weapon, Makarova.” How did he know? I didn’t want to be disarmed by him, but like Russia, I was unable to reject his terms. I took out Anton’s revolver and handed it over. “Will I get it back?”

“You’re likely to blow your hand off with it,” he said. “That would be most unfortunate.” He put it into his own pocket. “Although you might want it to wave around in unsavory company someday. Gurin will drop you.”

I was annoyed to have lost the gun and surprisingly disappointed to find myself summoned merely as a delivery girl suitable for reassuring a skittish customer. I’d thought for a moment his interest was personal. Humiliating, to have thought that a man desired you only to find he just wanted his laundry done. “What’s in the package?”

“Don’t think too much,” he said, and put the hyacinth behind my ear.


The address was in Kolomna, at the western edge of the city, an area of dockworkers, foreigners, and drifters, where Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman once chased the little clerk to his death and where the great poet Blok lived, in a gray six-story building on Ofitserskaya—now Decembrist—Street. As a girl, I had often lingered across from that building, on the embankment of the Pryazhka, imagining that Alexander Alexandrovich would look out from his desk and, seeing a young auburn-haired girl, might stop and wonder, might write a poem about her. I wrote dozens of poems for him that I left on posts and in the knotholes of trees and around the doorway of his building, in hopes he might find them. Such a thing of the past, when girls dreamed of poets instead of meat pies.

I clambered out of the sleigh and Gurin tossed me a small package wrapped in newspaper. “Pryazhka Embankment, number fourteen,” he said, then cracked the reins over the horse’s furry back. The monster startled, backed up on its huge round haunches, then took off again at a thundering trot. I watched them leave with an increasingly hopeless feeling. I’d assumed that if anything went wrong, I could run back out to the sleigh or that little Gurin would come in, guns blazing. I hefted the bundle, squeezed it, wondering what it contained. A package the size of a loaf of bread, wrapped in Petrogradskaya Pravda, tied with string.

The front house on the Pryazhka was 16–18, and the next 8–10, so number 14 had to be in the courtyard. I steeled myself and walked through the passage into the large courtyard, where a man was defecating in the snow, his bare buttocks sad and vulnerable over the dirty hummocks. Not a reassuring sight. A sturdy wooden house painted a pale green, older than any building on the street, sat back in the yard. Perhaps it had once belonged to a sea captain or had been used as a tavern—it would be the right size, and close to the docks. This had to be number 14. It was cold this far back from the street, slushy and forgotten, the pale sunlight muted, the air smelling of the gulf and the wet wood of the wharves. All I could hear was ice cracking—like boys breaking walnuts—from the house’s eaves, where the icicles reached almost to the ground.

I knocked on the old door.

A man opened it. He held a revolver trained at my heart. I would have dropped the package and run, but I couldn’t move. He was sweating—he looked as nervous as I did. He nodded me inside and patted my coat pockets. The room was bare but for a small wooden table and a couple of mismatched chairs. It probably had once been a cozy room—low beamed ceilings, a broad tile stove. Home for a sea captain, yes, but now, like half the city, it was being used for other purposes. On second glance, the man—thin, balding, blue-eyed and bespectacled, with a prominent Adam’s apple—wasn’t so threatening, only pugliviy. A teacher of philology, maybe, or mathematics.

He shut the door and locked it. “Open the package,” he told me, and his Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy. I tore off the wrappings. Passports. Ten of them at least. I spread them out on the table. New Soviet passports. And permissions for train passage, covered with stamps and signatures. What a treasure. They looked real, there in the dimness of the room, the light from the courtyard filtering through the dirty windows. Were they forgeries? Stolen? Had Arkady bribed someone inside the government?

The terror slid away from the man’s intellectual face. He actually laughed, his sharp Adam’s apple rising and falling. Tucking the gun into his belt, he started opening them up. Photographs were already affixed: mostly men, beardless, with workers’ caps. A couple of women. The documents were made out in black ink and stamped in a rainbow of colors, with different handwriting and printing in three languages—Russian, French, and German. Laughter gave way to a more solemn emotion as the man looked at one, then another. “Forgive me,” he said. “You don’t know how long we’ve been waiting. It was essential…” He took a handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket under his heavy coat and dabbed his eyes. “Thank God.”

I heard a sound from upstairs, the scrape of a chair. I missed the weight of Anton’s gun in my pocket. The ticking of a clock was loud as a hammer, but there was no second sound. Now that I’d delivered the goods, I was eager to be on my way. The man put the documents under his coat. Now would be the time to shoot me. Who would ever find me here? My legs shook. But he went to the cold stove and reached inside, into the ashes, and brought out a sooty package about the size of a cigar case, also wrapped in newspaper, this showing the masthead Znamya Truda—the Banner of Labor, the SR paper. “Give your mysterious employer our profoundest appreciation. You’re doing a tremendous service,” the teacher said, vigorously shaking my hand. “You don’t even know… for Mother Russia. For us all.”

Who could he be? What was Arkady abetting here? People leaving the country who might still have the wherewithal to buy ten passports on the black market? Not SRs, but aristocrats who had waited too long to fly. Perhaps they had held out for the Germans, and now realized their mistake. The combination of crime and political intrigue was dangerous indeed.

I took the smaller package and put it in my pocket, and nodding once more, flew out the door. Ah, blessed sunshine! But when I peered out the Pryazhka passageway into the street, I saw a man in a leather coat smoking under one of the bare poplars, watching the building. Cheka! Or maybe not, but I wouldn’t be around to discover the truth. I retreated through the archway and lost myself in the maze of slushy courtyards. There must be a second exit somewhere. I could have thrown the sooty little package into the snow—I couldn’t imagine the penalty if the Cheka caught me with something like this, linked me to speculation and counterrevolution and Arkady. But I didn’t dare throw it away. Arkady was the threat I believed more certain.

I found an opening onto Angliisky Prospect and walked away as quickly as I could, thinking that if Gurin had circled around to the Pryazhka, he would have seen our friend in black leather and would know enough to look for me elsewhere. I hurried east toward Senate Square and tried not to look back, not to look around at all, just to move forward. I wasn’t that girl delivering packages for the Archangel. I was a girl late to an exam, late to work at the telephone exchange, muttering under my breath, with the crabby face and irritated march of the tardy.

I made it all the way to Gorokhovaya Street, walking at that fast clip among the ghostly, dejected Petrograders and waiting for the sleigh to find me the way I used to wait for Kolya’s messengers. But that was in the high expectation of love, not this dread, jumping when a man started out of a doorway, flinching when people crowded too close behind me. Holy Theotokos, please let this end! Finally the black horse came abreast of me, passed me, and the sleigh turned in at a courtyard. I followed them in. The enormous beast nickered and blew hot air from its nostrils, its feathery fetlocks wet to the knee.

“Couldn’t you have picked me up back there?” I said, leaning on its shaggy neck. “I just crossed half the city on foot.”